VirtualBox V5.0.0 OSE for OS/2: new development started

Somehow by surprise a new attempt to port a current version of VirtualBox OSE to OS/2 was started in the beginning of August 2015. The last working version was VirtualBox V1.5x OSE from the year 2008. Another surprise, bww bitwise works GmbH teamed up with XEU.com to work on a current OS/2 port of VirtualBox. This is the first step of XEU.com (the part of Mensys that was responsible for eComStation) to support new software developments on OS/2 and eComStation. The development team already made some progress, the first target is to get the VBoxheadless VM up and running before doing the next steps. VMs like to have enough of RAM, hopefully it is possible to use RAM above the 4GB line with PAE and the help of the new QSInit loader.

Firefox ESR for OS/2: the update to the ESR 38 branch

Mozilla already switched from Firefox ESR 31 to the ESR 38 branch in March 2015. The work on the OS/2 version of the port started at the end of July 2015.  It was required to go to the current 38.2.0 code base because of the broken exception handling in 38.1.0.  Mozilla did a lot of code changes, the big ones are listed below:

• OOP support for the print dialog
• DOS and OS/2 specific encoding charsets were removed (Bug 1068514)
• changes in the system exception handling
• the move to C++ 11 compatible code
• JS string conversion changes

The previous OOP support for the plugin container was not working because of some unknown issues with OS/2’s multimedia framework. Thus the OOP support for printing will be most likely not be available in the recent OS/2 port. The base work was finished on 10th of September. The next step before the first alpha build is the work on build issues left. The current code level is 38.2.1 and there will be no new runtime libraries.